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A FOOTNOTE TO HISTORY
EIGHT YEARS OF TROUBLE IN SAMOA
by Robert Louis Stevenson

PREFACE

An affair which might be deemed worthy of a note of a few lines in any
general history has been here expanded to the size of a volume or large
pamphlet. The smallness of the scale, and the singularity of the manners
and events and many of the characters, considered, it is hoped that, in
spite of its outlandish subject, the sketch may find readers. It has
been a task of difficulty. Speed was essential, or it might come too
late to be of any service to a distracted country. Truth, in the midst
of conflicting rumours and in the dearth of printed material, was often
hard to ascertain, and since most of those engaged were of my personal
acquaintance, it was often more than delicate to express. I must
certainly have erred often and much; it is not for want of trouble taken
nor of an impartial temper. And if my plain speaking shall cost me any
of the friends that I still count, I shall be sorry, but I need not be
ashamed.

In one particular the spelling of Samoan words has been altered; and the
characteristic nasal n of the language written throughout ng instead
of g . Thus I put Pango Pango, instead of Pago Pago; the sound being
that of soft ng in English, as in singer , not as in finger .

R. L. S.
VAILIMA,
UPOLU,
SAMOA.

CHAPTER I THE ELEMENTS OF DISCORD: NATIVE

The story I have to tell is still going on as I write; the characters are
alive and active; it is a piece of contemporary history in the most exact
sense. And yet, for all its actuality and the part played in it by mails
and telegraphs and iron war ships, the ideas and the manners of the
native actors date back before the Roman Empire. They are Christians,
church goers, singers of hymns at family worship, hardy cricketers; their
books are printed in London by Spottiswoode, Trubner, or the Tract
Society; but in most other points they are the contemporaries of our
tattooed ancestors who drove their chariots on the wrong side of the
Roman wall. We have passed the feudal system; they are not yet clear of
the patriarchal. We are in the thick of the age of finance; they are in
a period of communism. And this makes them hard to understand.

To us, with our feudal ideas, Samoa has the first appearance of a land of
despotism. An elaborate courtliness marks the race alone among
Polynesians; terms of ceremony fly thick as oaths on board a ship;
commoners my lord each other when they meet and urchins as they play
marbles. And for the real noble a whole private dialect is set apart.
The common names for an axe, for blood, for bamboo, a bamboo knife, a
pig, food, entrails, and an oven are taboo in his presence, as the common
names for a bug and for many offices and members of the body are taboo in
the drawing rooms of English ladies. Special words are set apart for his
leg, his face, his hair, his belly, his eyelids, his son, his daughter,
his wife, his wife's pregnancy, his wife's adultery, adultery with his
wife, his dwelling, his spear, his comb, his sleep, his dreams, his
anger, the mutual anger of several chiefs, his food, his pleasure in
eating, the food and eating of his pigeons, his ulcers, his cough, his
sickness, his recovery, his death, his being carried on a bier, the
exhumation of his bones, and his skull after death. To address these
demigods is quite a branch of knowledge, and he who goes to visit a high
chief does well to make sure of the competence of his interpreter. To
complete the picture, the same word signifies the watching of a virgin
and the warding of a chief; and the same word means to cherish a chief
and to fondle a favourite child.

Men like us, full of memories of feudalism, hear of a man so addressed,
so flattered, and we leap at once to the conclusion that he is hereditary
and absolute. Hereditary he is; born of a great family, he must always
be a man of mark; but yet his office is elective and (in a weak sense) is
held on good behaviour... Continue reading book >>